Death of a Young Lieutenant E-Book

B.R. Stateham

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Jake Reynolds is an art thief. A master artist who can create an exact replica of any famous canvas, in intricate detail. So precise and elegant is his work that even today, hanging on the walls of the most prestigious museums and art galleries around the world, are some of his brilliant recreations.

It's the early 20th century, and this brilliant criminal is destined to rub shoulders with the famous and infamous. From Churchill to Mengele, Wright brothers to Picasso. In one fashion or another, he would know them all.

But for a lucky and daring man, Jake is plagued with one unlucky, debilitating weakness. Every time he stumbles upon the corpse of a murder victim, a peculiar sense of outrage takes over him. Even though he's a criminal himself, something within him rebels at the thought of a murderer getting away after committing such a heinous crime.

Compelled by this, Jake is determined to find any killer that comes across his way, and bring them to justice. And when they do, Jake has no choice. The hunt is on. Whoever said Fate smiled upon the unlucky?

A compelling historical mystery, 'Death Of A Young Lieutenant' is the first book in B.R. Stateham's Jake Reynolds Mysteries series.

Leseprobe

DEATH OF A YOUNG LIEUTENANT

JAKE REYNOLDS MYSTERIES

BOOK ONE

B.R. STATEHAM

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Next in the Series

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2023 B.R. Stateham

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Elizabeth N. Love

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

PROLOGUE

“Yes, I knew Wilbur Wright,” the white-haired, blue-eyed old man said as he reached for a beer and then sat back in his chair, pushing back the dark cowboy hat draped across his head in the process, “and Orville, for that matter. In fact it was Wilbur who taught me how to fly. I was the only American he taught while he was traveling through Europe. Let me see, it was… uh… in 1908 I think. Yep…1908.”

We sat on the east side of his beautiful ranch home protected from the murderous glare of a Kansas sun in the deep shade of the wide veranda. An ice cooler filled with freshly chilled beer sat at our feet. He sat in the canvas of a folding wooden chair with a cold brew in one hand and a smile on his handsome, weather-creased face.

I knew he was somewhere around eighty or more.

But to look at him and to listen to his stories it was impossible to believe he was much past fifty. The man's hair was absolutely white. His eyes were a mesmerizing gunmetal color that seemed to change from gray to blue depending on how the light reflected on them. There was a fire in those eyes. A fire of deep intelligence and singularity of purpose which became quickly apparent the first moment you laid eyes on him. He was tanned to a chestnut brown and fit and vibrantly alive.

“Now if you ask me if I liked the uppity son of a bitch, I’d have to say, ‘Hell no!’ He was a priggish little son of a straight-laced minister who never drank, never smoked, and never uttered a profane word in his life. He believed cleanliness was next to godliness, and he damn well expected the rest of us to be as godly as possible.”

I was captivated by this man’s hubris the moment he walked into a room. There was something about his personality that made you both instantly relax and trust him all at the same time. The more I talked to him, the more I found myself admiring this unique character. I have often thought how it was a stroke of divine providence which brought the two of us together in such a spurious fashion.

“But let me tell you, Wilbur and Orville were probably the two most hated men in all of France back in 1908. You could not believe the vilification these two bicycle mechanics aroused! My god, thinking about the passion the Wrights inflamed in the hearts of the French seems hilarious today. But fifty years ago, it could almost get a man killed.”

I grinned and shook my head. The old man was unbelievably amazing.

It is even more amazing to realize this man was at one time the world's greatest art thief. Not just an art thief of pedestrian qualities and arcane abilities. But a world class thief of unparalleled panache.

Yes.

I know.

Hard to believe.

I know skepticism fills anyone reading this claim. But I have listened to this man's stories and I have seen this man's evidence. Frankly there is no room to doubt his veracity. Jake Reynolds was, and might still be, the world's greatest art thief.

What evidence persuaded me to this conviction?

I have seen his collection of the world's greatest masterpieces. I have seen the originals. Yes, I said it–the originals. Hanging in some of the most prestigious art museums in the world are his copies of the originals. Copies so precise in detail and composition no one in the first fifty years of the Twentieth Century has suspected otherwise.

They still hang today in those same galleries. Museum curators are absolutely convinced they are the originals. Thousands of people file through the corridors of these illustrious museums to admire these glorious creations. They see but they do not observe. They are thrilled at the colorful visions before them. But none realize what they are admiring are the most cunningly created copies ever to be created by a master of forgery. The true originals hung for a number of years in his home hidden away in a secret vault under lock and key. No one knew about this deeply personal secret. It was a secret he had kept to himself for more than half a century. He told no one, until by a stroke of unanticipated fortune, he began talking to me on that one fine summer's afternoon after I had driven up from Wichita on an innocuous mission to interview him about his participation in World War One.

At one time I was a newspaper reporter. In 1964, as a cub reporter for The Wichita Eagle, a moderately sized morning newspaper for the largest city in Kansas, my editor wanted to find someone who had survived the first months of the First World War and interview him. It was going to be the fiftieth anniversary of this somewhat forgotten conflict and my editor wanted an up-close and personal interview with a survivor. He thought it would be a great lead-in piece for the paper’s planned edition of that part of the Twentieth Century. I had no idea what I was getting into when someone suggested I should talk to an old horse rancher who lived a hundred miles north of Wichita on a ranch just outside of a town called Salina, Kansas. He called himself Jake Reynolds. The tipster told me the old man was a much-decorated war veteran and one hell of a story-teller. He was correct on all accounts. Jake Reynolds turned out to be the most intriguing individual I have ever met.

How did I know he was a thief? Why would I believe the tall tales this grand old man wove for me hour after hour as I interviewed him? What proof did he offer, other than the paintings, for his outrageous claims? True. He could have made copies of the originals and claimed them to be the originals. But he knew too much. He knew details and individuals intimately. Too intimately to be mere creations of his imagination.

Jake was like no other person I have ever met. Strong, lithe, with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor, he certainly did not act like the usual octogenarian. First of all he lived in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a wide, spacious sandstone, with natural hardwood paneling and brightly polished hard wood floors. I never found out how Jake met America's most famous architect. Or how this uniquely designed home did not eventually find itself placed on some national register. But that was the modus operandi of this old man. In that house and tucked behind a fireplace which, to a casual observer, seemed to be one entire living room wall, was a secret vault only a few people knew existed. In that room were many of the world's greatest paintings of antique and modern masters.

Not the fakes, mind you. Originals.

Monets, Raphaels, van Ecks, da Vincis, Picassos, Degas – names which reverberate throughout the art world were all represented. Hanging in columns of five or more paintings, one above the other, each framed in simple oak frames and lit by soft indirect lighting, were more than sixty of the world's most treasured originals. Originals housed in a private collection reserved for only the eyes of a single solitary person to admire. Art so wonderful and so rare they took my breath from me the first time I followed him into his treasure vault. Even now, thinking about it all these years after the old man's death, my pulse is beating rapidly, and I am finding it difficult to breathe.

Each original had a story. A story Jake was more than happy to relate. He consented to dictate into my tape recorder his entire life as an art thief. At eighty he perhaps knew he wasn't going to live much longer. I am sure he wanted to leave behind some record of his accomplishments when he began dictating his life’s story. I agreed to remain silent until he died and his last two surviving relatives, two cherished nephews, passed away as well. With this agreement consummated by a firm handshake, this fine old man began relating to me the most unbelievable series of stories ever to be set down for posterity. To back up his otherwise preposterous sounding claims were the paintings—those beautiful, breathtaking paintings.

One painting, set in the corner of the room on a fine old Louis XIVth table particularly caught my attention. The painting was actually three large oak panels, the wood split with antiquity, with each panel showing some scene of the Madonna and Christ child. Although I was not an art historian, I did remember my college days and the Art Appreciation classes I took. It seemed to me these wooden panels looked familiar. On that afternoon, as we sat in those comfortable deep leather chairs on that wide, spacious veranda drinking beer and talking about art, I made a casual remark about those wooden panels and how they reminded me of the painting style of Jan van Eck.

"Ah, you are quite right. It is one of Jan van Eck's earliest masterpieces. Hmmm, interesting. You came up to interview me about my war record. Well, would you like to hear the real story? The truth, as this old man saw and lived it? Yes? Very well. You’ve noticed this painting by van Eck. Would you believe that in the opening weeks of the Great War, when all of the Allied armies were being pummeled mercilessly by the Kaiser’s armies, I lifted this piece from under the noses of an entire German army? Care to hear about it?"

I most assuredly did want to hear his story. I recorded the story on my trusty tape recorder and then patiently waited for almost thirty years to fulfill my promise to him. With the release of my promise I decided to publish this man's incredible story. It is an amazing story about an amazing man, living an amazing life in the first part of an amazing century.

1

A hot summer sun. Interminable heat.

Gray smoke, from raging fires of burning farmsteads, lifting into the air.

He grinned and ran an oil-stained hand through his curly hair. Standing up, straddling the heavy German motorcycle, he half turned and stared at the burning bridge and the wide canal it once spanned. A wide canal cutting through the flat Belgium countryside. A piece of serendipity if he ever saw one.

Perfect.

If he could get across himself.

Blipping the throttle of the cycle nervously he turned again and looked over his right shoulder. A mile away the ghost-like apparition of a company of German cavalry. A Hussars company wearing the incredibly large, furred hat called a colback and dressed in field gray with bright yellow braided loops around their right epaulets, caused him to say a few choice profanities under his breath. The Boche horses were sweating and covered in the light-colored Belgium soil. Signs they had been ridden hard.

The horsemen looked unshaven and equally unkept. He watched, standing and straddling the bike, as the whole company of Hussars materialized out of the darkness of the mass of trees like forest wraiths. A number of them began to look at the ground intently while others scanned the distances in each direction. One of the horsemen stood up in his stirrups and pointed toward his direction. As if moved by one hand the two hundred or so horsemen altered course and began whipping their steeds even more in an effort to reach the captain before he escaped.

A grin spread across his thin lips again just as a lock of curly hair fell across his right eyebrow. A boyish, mischievous grin. A grin which made women want to cuddle and forgive him of his sins. A grin which made even hardened old soldiers—pessimists to the core—nod their heads and grin back. A grin which could make even a serial killer want to become a close bosom friend.

It had always been that way with Jake. That grin. A sudden impish smirk lighting up his face and melting even the coldest of hearts. Because of that grin he could make friends with anyone. Make’em good friends. Life-long friends. Friends that would do anything for him.

He blipped the cycle’s engine a few more times as he turned to look at the burning bridge again. He was in the flat irrigated low country of Belgium. Barely five miles away from the French border. On either side of him was an expanse of rolling farmland burnt brown from the incredibly hot summer’s sun. In front of him was the irrigation canal. Eyeing it, he thought it was maybe twenty feet wide which cut the country neatly in half for more than two miles in either direction. The water was deep and tepid. The perfect obstacle to stop advancing cavalry if one could figure out how to get over to the other side. Almost everywhere one looked, towering columns of black smoke from burning farms and destroyed villages twisted and billowed into the wind as they rose into the sky. They were grim testaments of the approaching Teutonic war machine as it continued to sweep through the Low Countries.

The opening three weeks of the war had not gone as planned for the Allies. At the start both the French and the British collected their armies and went strutting through the countryside singing patriotic songs and acting as if this war was going to be a summer’s vacation and nothing more. With an unbelievable elan and incredible naivete the Allies gaily hurled themselves into the advancing iron fist of the Kaiser’s field armies. The French in particular thought Gallic bravery, and thousands of eager infantrymen, would be more than enough to blunt the thrusting arms of the Boche armies.

They were wrong.

What they ran into was a masterful display of Germanic planning and use of new technology. Army units equipped with copious amounts of machine guns, and backed up by superb usage of artillery, shredded the woefully and inadequately equipped French. In a span of barely three weeks all the front-line units of the French armies suffered incredible losses. Wave after wave of French infantry went gallantly charging across Belgium fields only to be mowed down in droves. French army units, wearing the dark blue tunics and red trousers of an era from out of the era of Napoleon, showed the world how to die in mass numbers. They did nothing to slow the Teutonic determination to capture Paris before summer’s end.

No commander knew in what direction their flanks might lie.

No one knew what lay in front of them. Nor behind them.

No one knew anything other than an overwhelming urge to get back to France and regroup. This pandemic uncertainty was the reason why he was here, hurriedly surveying the countryside and the burning bridge itself, astride the back of a stolen German Army Signal Corp’s motorcycle and wondering whimsically what a Boche prisoner of war camp might be like. His squadron, one of the first to be organized in the newly created Royal Flying Corps, was three miles away on the other side of the canal. His commanding officer asked him to go out on a one-man reconnaissance party. Since there was no contact whatsoever with army headquarters, the squadron was hanging in limbo and dangling by a thin thread over a cauldron of German fury ready to be severed by a Boche’s bayonet.

Only one serviceable aeroplane was left. One out of the fifteen assorted machines the squadron had started out with only three weeks earlier. This last machine, in the colonel's opinion, was far too valuable to send up to look for the enemy. He wanted to send it back to France. To a place where it would be safe. But where? Before he could do anything to save men or material, he first had to know how close the enemy might be. He had to know from what direction or directions they were coming.

So he, Jake Reynolds, agreed to go out and find the Germans. And here he was. In the middle of open country with a company of angry German Hussars riding furiously toward him determined to capture him and send him back to a POW camp. Grinning, he decided he had better things to do than eat cabbage and potatoes behind a barbed wire fence. Using the sleeve of his right arm to wipe the rolling sweat off his dirty face, he took a quick glance at the conflagration consuming the bridge and made a decision. Slapping the cycle’s gearbox into gear, he gunned the engine and kicked up dust as he spun around to his right and raced back down the road and toward the hard-riding cavalry.

The narrow bridge was burning fiercely and making a lot of rolling smoke in the process, but it was burning only in the middle span of the bridge and nowhere else. Both sides of the bridge’s approaches slanted upward toward the middle, giving him, in other words, a perfect ramp to jump the cycle through the flames and over the burning section if he could get the small cycle up to speed in such a short space. The problem was he would have to race back around the curve and approach the on-coming Hussars before turning around and gunning the engine for all its worth back toward the bridge. Quickly assessing other possible options, he saw there were no other viable choices available. It was either succeed in this one attempt or spend the rest of the war as an uninvited guest of the Kaiser.

Sliding around the curve, going in the opposite direction he had just traversed, Jake twisted the cycle’s throttle wide open and bent low over the handlebars as he aimed the front wheel toward the approaching cavalry. Ahead of him the German cavalry saw him coming at them and they began to shout in glee. Their euphoria changed to consternation when they observed the madman on the motorcycle aiming directly at them and accelerating at the same time. Horsemen and cyclist closed in on each other at a furious pace. Cavalrymen sat up in their saddles and started shouting at each other to warn their comrades of this crazy Englishman! Just as it looked as if the cyclist was going to drive right through the middle of the cavalry, the cycle slowed and suddenly its rider was twisting the cycle around and around in the country lane, throwing up a gigantic curtain of dust and almost running over several horses and men in the process.

Horses and riders galloped in every direction to get away from the madman. Some horses began bucking and threw their riders off before galloping off, their reins flapping in the dust as they disappeared back down the road. The dust was thick, making men choke and eyes water, and still this madman continued circling his cycle around and around in the dirt. Finally, just as several of the Hussars retrieved their rifles slung around their backs and began to aim at the insane cyclist, the British officer gunned his machine loudly and shot off down the road toward the burning bridge in a blinding blur of motion!

Jake, grinning from ear to ear, deftly leaned to one direction or the other in order to slip past a horse and rider as he leaned forward over the cycle’s handlebars. The sharp crack of several Mauser rifles firing close by did not bother him as he and his machine shot through the ball of hanging dust and sped into clear space. Accelerating rapidly, he soon left the befuddled horsemen behind him. Leaning into the curve, he used a boot again to keep him upright, and then, with the burning bridge directly in front of him, he twisted the machine’s throttle open for all its worth. At forty miles per hour the stolen German Signal Corp’s cycle and its rider hit the inclined approach of the bridge and went airborne almost immediately.

Through smoke and flame the machine and Jake flew. He was vaguely aware of a sudden hot sting of flame on the back of his leg. But then they were descending rapidly and he had no time to think of anything else. Lifting the nose of the machine up slightly, he brought the machine down directly in the middle of the approach on the far side and landed perfectly! Gunning the engine wide open again, Jake sped off into the Belgium countryside at a high rate of speed, leaving behind him a company of angry Hussars who could only sit in the saddles of their mounts and watch the madman disappear into the heat’s shimmering haze.

* * *

When he arrived back at his squadron, he found the personnel in the unit running about like disturbed ants in a disemboweled ant hill. Groups of enlisted men were knocking down row after row of tents with a practiced ease. A second group following behind the first expertly rolled each tent up and threw them into the back of a slow-moving American-made Model T Ford truck. As he climbed off his stolen bike he saw thirty or so men run to the garish red circus tent, a gift from the famous Chubbs & Blaine circus families of London, and deftly drop the cavernous tent in a billowing cloud of dust and leaves in the blinking of an eye. The tent, like all the other equipment of the squadron, was a gift from the British public to the fledgling new Royal Flying Corps, as were the American-made Ford trucks and the aeroplanes. Everything needed to equip a squadron had been hurriedly scrounged up at the beginning of the war and quickly shipped to France.

The blood-red circus tent was the squadron’s main hangar. With Chubbs & Blaine Circus of Renown emblazoned in bright yellow letters across the very top canvas of the monstrosity, Jake half grinned when the thought occurred to him the tent was the perfect example of a world gone crazy. All of Europe since 1900 knew there was going to be a European war. Grand armies and navies, the collective technological essence of each nation, had been built by each belligerent country. Everyone knew the war, before the shooting started, was going to be a glorious affair with bands playing, women dancing in the streets, and handsome young men in bright new uniforms marching off into glory in long snake-like columns of martial manhood. When war was finally declared, people in every European capital fled to the streets and cheered and danced until the wee hours of the morning. A whole continent was gripped in jubilant frenzy as formal declarations of war were hurriedly telegraphed from one European capital to the next.

The insane carnival of nationalistic lust to kill the enemy lasted all of two weeks. This naive exuberance for martial glory rapidly fell to the wayside as soon as the armies met in the field underneath that blistering sun in 1914. The British Expeditionary Force, relying on the French to provide the needed intelligence to set up lines of defense, was dangerously close to being bagged in its entirety by the sweeping armies of the Kaiser. Without any idea where the enemy was, or for that matter where the French might be, the BEF was setting in the gaping mouth of an elaborate trap about ready to be snapped tightly shut by the hard-charging Huns.

He, like thousands of others like him, quickly signed up and joined the army when war was declared. Being an American with an English mother, and being well connected with many of England’s most powerful strata, he found it easy enough to acquire a captaincy in the newly organized RFC. Well-known prior to the war as an international sportsman, especially as a man who loved fast cars and fast aeroplanes, Jake’s reputation alone as a daring and accomplished aviator would give him immediate access to whatever he wanted. It was, however, his true vocation, his hidden life away from the sports world and national attention, which acquired for him his rank and posting.

Few people would have suspected the truth. Those few who did know the dark-haired American’s occupation vowed to keep silent about it. They had to. If not, they would have been considered accomplices of Jake’s malfeasance and subject to arrest.

These people who knew Jake’s secretive skills were also the people who had the means to make sure the law never touched him. His select group of clients also walked the halls of power in almost every European country. From Prime Ministers to noblemen, from financiers who controlled the financial strings of entire nations, to lowly police captains who were totally captivated in their madness, all agreed no official inquiry about Jake’s unique talents would ever come his way.

Jake was a thief. But not just an ordinary thief. He was not the smash-and-run kind of commonplace criminal found in any back alley. Mediocrity was not in his vocabulary. Jake was a connoisseur. A master at his trade. A specialist who, for a price, would acquire a Renaissance masterpiece and create a forgery so exact in detail, so precise in its workmanship, no art expert ever suspected otherwise in the forty years of his career. Even today – long after his retirement – on the walls of some of the most famous museums and private collections hang many of his superb forgeries. Monets, Raphaels, da Vincis, the rarest of the rare were all, at one time or the other, copied meticulously by Jake and surreptitiously substituted for the originals.

Not once in his clandestine occupation was he ever arrested or seriously suspected by the authorities. None of his clients ever mentioned his name. They went to their deathbeds telling no living soul of their all-consuming passions. For unlike other collectors, these well-heeled individuals of power collected with a zealot’s fever burning their brows. They collected the originals for the passion of being the sole owners, and the sole admirers, of pieces of art the world would never see again.

Thanks to Jake’s connections, he was capable of acquiring for his new squadron a number of critically important components any squadron needed to operate. The lumbering Ford trucks the squadron used to move men and material around were a gift from a very wealthy American ex-patriot living in London. Several of the squadron’s aeroplanes were donations to the squadron by other clients. The unbelievably gauche Chubbs & Blaine circus tent, delivered to the squadron by truck the day before shipping out to France, came their way thanks to one of his phone calls.

That had been the beginning of August. Now they were down to one flyable machine, three trucks, and a gaggle of men running for their lives. One person, in particular, seemed to be quite animated as he watched Sergeant Lonnie Burton running toward him with a worried look on his usually cheery face. The look on the sergeant’s face clearly advertised trouble.

“Captain! You’re back. The colonel told me to bring you to him just as soon as you showed up. It’s a hell of a mess, sir.”

Burton was a big NCO who knew how, under normal conditions, to run the enlisted men as well as he knew how to tear down a motor and put it back together. He noted, however, these last few weeks could not be considered normal by even the most liberal of interpretations. The solidly built sergeant, puffing from his long run across the empty field, with sweat drenching his face and tunic equally, looked as if he had seen a ghost.

“What’s up, Lonnie?”

“It’s Lieutenant Oglethorpe, sir. He’s with the colonel and the colonel is going to charge the boy with murder.”

“Murder!” Jake grunted, turning to look at the NCO in surprise. “Who the hell did he get into a fight with this time?”

“It’s Sergeant Grimms, sir. Apparently they found the sergeant’s body at the crash site. He was dead and the lieutenant was alive. I really don’t know all the details. The colonel is over there in that hut with the lieutenant.”

“Hell, they went down yesterday. Our first reports said both of them were dead. What’s this about murder?”

Yesterday morning the young lieutenant and the sergeant took off in, at that time, one of the two serviceable machines remaining to the squadron. Their mission was to be a two-hour reconnaissance/photography mission. But forty-five minutes after their departure the squadron got a telephone call from a French infantry unit who claimed they saw a British machine going down in a thicket of woods just outside a little village called Epernay. Since they were the only squadron around in the immediate area it had to be Lieutenant Oglethorpe and Sergeant Grimms who crashed.

“They are in there,” Burton said, gulping as he wiped sweat rolling off his forehead and pointed to a half-destroyed peasant’s hut still partially standing underneath a large elm tree. Jake nodded silently and then ducked his head to step in through the narrow door.

The startling darkness within the hut momentarily blinded him for a moment or two as he entered the mangled remains of the hovel. The shadows were, however, not so dark as to keep him from seeing the form of the young lieutenant sitting on an empty wooden crate in the middle of the room. Nor was it so dark to note the young officer’s bloodstained and tattered uniform hanging like ancient rags on his markedly thin frame. Dirt and oil covered half of the lad’s face, along with a nasty and quite bloody track of a bullet that had neatly channeled a deep groove down the right side of the man’s forehead. Holding his chest with one hand, the young man forced himself to work through the pain and breathe. Each breath forced him to clench his teeth together to keep from yelling out in agony. Jake lifted an eyebrow in surprise and wondered how much longer the young man would remain conscious.

Quietly the dark-eyed American unbuttoned his right tunic pocket and fished out a pack of cigarettes. Shaking one free he stepped toward the young officer and held it close to the man’s lips. A flash of gratitude exploded in the lieutenant’s dark brown eyes. Carefully the young officer pulled the cigarette out of the pack with his lips while not trying to move any part of his body in the process.

“Jimmy, you certainly know how to get yourself into a jam,” the American said, grinning as he lit a match and held it up to the trembling cigarette. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Bloody hell!” a second voice exploded from out of the darkest shadows of the room, followed by the cracking snap of a riding crop slapping hard across a pair of heavy leather boots. “Bloody hell! I’ll tell you what happened, Captain Reynolds. Our hot-headed young friend crashed his machine outside some godforsaken French hamlet in a possible attempt to conceal a crime!”

The voice was filled with a crackling electrical rage one could feel emanating from out of the darkness. It belonged to Colonel Archibald Wingate, the squadron’s commander, who materialized quite dramatically into a sliver of light that illuminated part of the hut’s dirt floor directly behind the lieutenant.

“This incompetent fool’s attempt to hide a crime seems to be the only logical answer. I am told there is no doubt our Sergeant Grimms was a victim of foul play. He didn’t die from some Hun’s well-aimed bullet. Oh, no! Nothing so simple as that, damnit. Do you remember the lieutenant’s temper tantrum the other night? Yes? Well, our young friend here shouted at the top of his lungs he was going to kill Sergeant Grimms some day, and by Jove, that some day happened the very next day!”

“But murder, colonel?”

“Bah, it’s a bloody sordid little tale!” the colonel boomed, turning and breaking into a pacing trot back and forth through the shaft of light. With each third step he brought his riding crop down like an executioner’s pistol exploding in the darkness. “Twenty minutes ago a regiment of French cavalry deposited the lieutenant onto our doorstep just as you see him. The French told me an incredible story. It seems they saw young Oglethorpe’s plane come down into the woods outside of Epernay yesterday. When they went off to see if anyone survived they ran into a Boche infantry regiment and had a hot run of it before they drove them off. But here is where it becomes a preposterous nightmare, captain. They find the lieutenant lying on the ground unconscious. In his right hand is his freshly fired service revolver. Strapped in the observation seat of the aeroplane is Sergeant Grimms. Grimms is dead with a bullet through his forehead. Shot at close range, the French captain assured me, and shot by the lieutenant’s gun.”

Jake eyed the wobbly, pale young officer with a critical eye for a moment or two and then took his time lighting up a cigarette for himself. James Oglethorpe was the only son of Brigadier General, Sir John Oglethorpe. Sir John was old army. He had spent years in India and Egypt serving His Majesty’s government. As a young junior officer in the 70s, he fought African Zulus. In India he fought Afghan Moslems and Indian Thuggee murder cults. The elder Oglethorpe was wounded and decorated so many times it was said he was the most decorated officer, active or retired, yet living. Tough, iron-willed, unbending yet almost apostolic in his fairness, the general was something of a legend in the British Army. By anyone’s measure, the father to this injured lieutenant was one of the rarest of rare jewels. He was a bona fide living hero. Retired now, Sir John held a minister’s job within the government. A very powerful job reserved only for the most trusted, and most dependable, of servants the government could find.

Sir John was one of Jake’s clients in the surreptitiously secret trade he practiced. In fact, the elder was Jake’s first client and his most ardent of collectors. It was a word to Sir John that quickly acquired his captaincy in the Royal Flying Corps. Acquired, in part, not only to help someone who so expertly fed his mania for collecting rare art, but for more personal reasons as well. Getting his commission, and being assigned to this squadron, fulfilled one of the elder Oglethorpe’s goals. It had to do with the younger Oglethorpe, now sitting on a wooden crate in front of Jake holding his aching rib cage and dangerously leaning to one side and on the verge of falling off his perch altogether.

Father and son were like oil and water. They were two opposites so extreme in their personalities they guaranteed there would be friction between them. The son was wild, impetuous, spoiled to extreme by his doting mother, and incapable of controlling his anger. It was no secret James Oglethorpe hated his father. It was no secret Sir John was as stoic and as unbending toward his son as he was to the rest of the human race. What no one fully understood was the elder’s love for his son. Years earlier the two had parted company, with only his mother keeping in direct contact with her son. Yet even in this forced estrangement, not a day passed where the general was not well aware of his son’s health and well-being. One of the benefits of power the general often employed was the benefit of keeping a discreet and covert eye on someone he loved.

When war broke out, and Jimmy rushed off to join the just-created Royal Flying Corps, it was Sir John who made sure his son received an officer’s commission. When Jake called on the good general in seeking help in getting an officer’s post, it was Sir John who readily agreed in turn, Jake would accept a posting to his son’s squadron and do his best to keep Jimmy Oglethorpe out of harm’s way. “War is war,” the general said. “No one can keep him from getting killed in combat. But perhaps you could be close by and refrain him from doing something stupid?”

Jake saw no problem with the proviso. It had been Jake who taught the younger Oglethorpe to fly. He had been, on a number of occasions, the intermediary Sir John sent to correct gambling debts and other youthful indiscretions his headstrong son found himself entangled in. To be frank, Jake was already intimately involved in the family secrets without Jimmy once suspecting the contrary. So now the big American stood eyeing the young lieutenant, a cigarette dangling from his thin lips, thinking to himself a court martial and firing squad would surely kill the old man.

“Do you see my dilemma, captain? The entire bloody German Army is descending upon us even as we speak. Our bloody army has packed their bags and ran for parts unknown. Half of my squadron is scattered from here to some strange French village called Coulommiers and now I have this bloody mess fall into my lap!”